I’m Jamie van Dyke, a freelance Ruby developer. I've been doing web application development and infrastructure for over 6 years. I'm half British and half Dutch, I live in the North of England and I'm in my early thirties.
I sometimes play World of Warcraft. One of the guilds I played with found it useful to know what dungeons we would be doing that evening, but rather than everyone checking the calendar we found a more efficient way for everyone to be informed about an event. We used Twitter, found out how.
I put together a little PDF handout to help get started with Ruby, it’s not much but it’s free, and I release it under the same license as this site.
One of my last projects required me to spend a ridiculous amount of time categorising images into groups of colour. What a pain in the gluteus maximus. So bollocks to that, let’s see if we can’t automate it a little to cut down on the flak.
Ever wanted to make a simple backup of a file before you overwrite it in Ruby? The backup gem does exactly that. Now you can overwrite files with the safe knowledge that the previous version is still around.
A few years back I wrote an article for “The Rubyist” about building Ruby Gems with Behaviour Driven Development, specifically RSpec in this case. I run through how I use Mr Bones to create the skeleton project and then begin the cycle of failing tests and passing tests.
